Y'all know that huge project I worked on all last week? If you don't, I'll summarize by saying I worked 12+ hours a day on it for eight days straight.

I did everything for them. I built the list of materials, I figured the travel costs, I found suppliers, I found other subs who were better suited to certain (small) aspects of the job than my company, etc. The only thing they had to do was take all my work, add their margins for managing the contract, pretty it up a litte bit, and send it. I did everything else for them based on the understanding that if they win the bid, we get the work.

I guess they forget sometimes that I'm on their network, I dunno. But I just got a hair up my butt and wanted to see what the final proposal looked like. I mean, I spent a lot of time on it, I basically wanted to see how well they perfumed the pig, so to speak. Every other sub contractor, maufacturer, teaming partner, etc. is listed by name. My company is not. I even did a 'find all' instances of my company name in case I missed it and it doesn't appear anywhere in the file.

What does that mean? It means that now during the month they have waiting to see if they get the contract awarded to them they're going to go to other subs--with my list of materials, labor estimates, et al-- and say "$tk said he'll do it for this price. Can you do it cheaper?"

They're looking to cut me out of this. Sons of motherless goats. I'm so pissed I could spit nails. What a bunch of unethical scum bags. I hate my customer. If they win this job and the work doesn't go to us, there will be some kind of hell to pay, I'm sure of it. I'm tired of them jacking my company around. Hell, they get 100% free engineering support (me) because we're supposed to be their preferred sub. But they've screwed us again and again. All we do is get called to clean up other peoples messes after they went with lowest bid, and then have to listen to them complain that they don't have enough money to pay us are normal rates so could we please reduce them.

This sucks.